Displaying items by tag: addition

Officials at the Frick Collection knew their plan to build a six-story addition to a beloved, landmark, jewel-box museum would draw detractors. But leaders of that Fifth Avenue museum say they didn’t expect it to get so intense so fast.

Since the museum announced its expansion in June, more than 2,000 critics of the plan have signed a petition put together by a consortium of preservation groups that have created a website and given themselves a name: Unite to Save the Frick.

Now, the group says it has found evidence that the museum, whose plan needs city approval, is going back on a promise made in its original landmark review roughly 40 years ago to make permanent a garden by the noted landscape architect Russell Page that is to be destroyed in the expansion.

That black speck walking precariously out on the Milwaukee Art Museum's giant white wings? That's a painter.

Matt Radmacher, owner of Wisconsin Industrial Painters, and two other painters are touching up 40 rust spots on the museum's Burke Brise Soleil — affectionately called wings — and repainting 72 rusted plates at the base.

This is only the second time the museum's addition, designed by internationally known Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has needed touching up since it opened in 2001. At the time, it was Calatrava's first completed American project.

The latest design of a planned addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum drew praise at a public hearing Tuesday night, with the Lakefront Development Advisory Commission unanimously recommending approval for the project.

The commission in April 2013 unanimously approved the initial museum addition design, which was done by architect Jim Shields of HGA Architects and Engineers.

But a revised design — made by HGA but without Shields — unveiled last month drew criticism. The Journal Sentinel's Mary Louise Schumacher called it "a dose of dullness for our most prized public space."

Another revision, this one with Shields back at the helm, was unveiled Tuesday.